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Co-branding with Microsoft: six ways to enhance your go-to-market content

Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Reading time: 8 minutes

Making your brand stand out in noisy, crowded advertising spaces – both digital and physical – is getting increasingly harder. It’s especially tough if your organization doesn’t yet have a widely recognized brand name or is at the very start of its brand awareness journey.

While most brand marketing advice today focuses on improving the authenticity and originality of your brand’s messaging, it can also lead to overlooking seemingly evident and simple content enhancements, such as leveraging your partnerships with better-known players on the market.

According to research, half of all businesses that co-brand products and services believe such partnerships are worth up to a fifth of their overall revenue. This makes co-branding a huge opportunity. Moreover, while you may instantly think of a tie-up as mostly a business-to-consumer strategy, when done well it easily translates to business-to-business (B2B) campaign success.

As a Microsoft Partner there are multiple benefits to your business when you co-brand communications with the tech giant, from boosting your presence in a crowded market to promoting your digital innovation capabilities – backed as you are by a world leader in tech-driven transformation and the market leading ERP solution provider.

Why Partners co-brand with Microsoft

Your go-to-market priority might understandably be to put your own unique brand in the spotlight when communicating with your target audiences. After all, your business is best placed to demonstrate an unrivalled understanding of the digital revolution needed to turbo-charge the performance of your local customers.

But performing a couple of simple co-branding actions with a well-known brand such as Microsoft, and highlighting your expertise in Microsoft’s products, can amplify your unique message.

As an example, a single action as simple as enhancing Microsoft presence on your website, starting with the home page and product pages, can work wonders.

Are you already adding your Microsoft Partner designation logo to your website and all channels or platforms where you showcase your brand? If not, consider an A/B test to determine whether this is something that can attract more visitors to your advertising channels and increase conversions.

Companial’s experience shows that demonstrating your Microsoft expertise and partnership is likely to garner opportunities that could otherwise be missed. Many of your prospective customers aren’t just looking for a tech vendor like you who is known for digital innovation; they also want to deal with an expert in Microsoft products, because those products are what they want to build their business on.

Moreover, Microsoft wants to partner with you too! So much so that it has created this Microsoft’s co-branding with Partners space where you can find all the information you will need to partner with Microsoft in your go-to-market and brand initiatives, along with marketing and sales content from ad banners to sales enablement collateral.

How to co-brand your business with Microsoft

Below are six methods of making the might of Microsoft’s marketing work for your business, with some of the advice focused on the Business Central and Copilot co-branded content.

Go all-in on logos – As mentioned above, including the Microsoft logo or, better still, your Microsoft Solution Partner logo on your advertising channels is a simple but powerful starting point. Emblazon it on your website’s home page, product page and campaign landing pages. But its power extends further. There’s much to be gained from getting into the habit of adding the logo to collateral across the board; meaning sales decks and brochures, webinar/webcast slides, infographics, press releases and more. In doing so, ensure you’re following Microsoft Trademark and Brand Guidelines.

Using proof points – Content makes the world go round, producing click-prompting customer engagement. As you craft content that helps your business to stand out to your target audiences, sprinkle the copy and visuals with facts, stats and advice provided by Microsoft to add heft to your viewpoint. Demonstrate the value of using Microsoft-powered products and services to your prospects and customers, and they’ll be eager to find out more. For instance, you can find a wealth of industry insights and statistics that will support your go-to-market and sales content in this Forrester Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 360 Business Central study.

Work done for you – Not only does co-branding with Microsoft make good business sense, it’s also easier than you might think. That’s because Microsoft supplies its Partner community with pre-branded marketing and sales campaign assets allowing you to plan and run campaigns quickly and efficiently. Visit online co-branded go-to-market campaign collateral to tap into assets including e-books, social media banners and email templates, and enjoy a head start.

Co-brand the channel – If you’re not new to marketing, you are likely to have heard the term “multi-channel” a lot. The art of any successful go-to-market strategy includes a smart use of the multiple channels available to help your message reach your target audiences. It’s also another opportunity to highlight your expertise as a Microsoft Partner that you shouldn’t pass up. For example, whenever you’re posting insights, promoting products or parading expertise on social media channels, be sure to mention and tag Microsoft for additional traction.

Concierge services – Most business development and sales professionals agree that people buy from people, even more so in B2B. Sometimes when meeting with your perspective customer at a pre-sales stage you might require a Microsoft-side specialist alongside yours to cover all customer requirements that may influence their buying decision. As an added-value service for its Partners, Microsoft provides practical support for pre-sales and post-sales activity to maximize impact. Find out more at Business Central Concierge or dip into pre-sales knowhow to prove the value of Microsoft solutions and drive customer acquisition.

Join the huddle – Microsoft values its Partners and understands the benefit of knowledge sharing across the community. To discover and discuss more ways of co-branding and going to market jointly with Microsoft, join its marketing-focussed events which you can sign up for to boost your go-to-market skills. You can also check out your Microsoft Partner space to discover the latest ways to co-sell.

Marching forward in lockstep with Microsoft

If you aren’t doing so already, it’s time to let Microsoft do some of the heavy lifting of your sales and marketing activity by co-branding all of your customer-facing collateral in the ways described above and using Microsoft channel-specific templates for co-branding to make your job even easier.

More than that, co-branding can win a huge competitive advantage. As more of the world moves online your customers will demand digital solutions that help their business to innovate, transform and differentiate with the support of the right technology partner: your company, and the might of Microsoft marching alongside you.

The Companial Center of Excellence for Go-to-Market (CoE for GTM) empowers Companial partners to accelerate customer acquisition by enhancing sales and marketing effectiveness through tailored go-to-market activities. Delivered in partnership with Microsoft, the CoE focuses on driving new customer adds for Business Applications-based products and supporting partners in the Microsoft Business Applications (BA) and Copilot space.

Ready to supercharge your sales and marketing efforts? Explore the full range of GTM CoE services on the GTM CoE Knowledge Hub.

Not a Companial Member yet? Discover how membership can benefit your business by exploring our Membership options.

Olga Generalova
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